A Scalable Probing-based Approach for Congestion Detection using Message Passing

In this paper we consider the theoretical and practical management resources needed to reliably localize congested nodes/links and propose a solution based on decoding linear error control codes. We define the scalability of measurement-based network monitoring and relate this to the problem decoding of linear error control codes on a binary symmetric channel. Our main goal is to minimize the number of probe packets required to fully identify congested nodes and our approach requires a number of measurements that grows linearly with respect to the network size, i.e. the approach is scalable. We provide fundamental limits on the relationship between the number of probe packets, size of the network and the ability to perfectly identify all congested nodes. To identify the congested nodes we construct a bipartite graph, and congestion is inferred using the message-passing algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate the ability to perfectly locate congested nodes using this approach.